In addition to popular applications such as voice over IP (VoIP) and video conferencing, there has been a rapid increase in interactive cloud based software applications. Compared to traditional real-time media (VoIP/conferencing) and file delivery, interactive applications exhibit a number of unique characteristics: 1) they are delay sensitive and yet demand in-order and reliable data delivery, and 2) the data traffic is typically bursty. Traditional window-based congestion control does not work well for interactive applications because the bursty arrival of data leads to bursty network traffic, causing additional queuing delay and packet loss in the network which affect the performance of the interactive application.
Latency, congestion, and data loss may result in delays that negatively impact real time end user experience in delay sensitive applications such as interactive media (e.g., VOIP, remote desktop, and videoconferencing). Such delay sensitive applications typically require low queuing delay and practically zero packet loss. The queuing delay and packet loss required by these applications is usually much less than that provided by existing congestion control protocols such as TCP-like congestion control (as well as TCP variants) or even TCP-friendly rate control (TFRC). Even TFRC gives queuing delay and packet loss similar to TCP-like congestion control, the only difference being that it reduces the oscillatory behavior of TCP-like congestion control.